Amazing Race - Family Edition

COVID-19 - School Closure - Day 25

For the past week... I've been running the Amazing Race at home.  Coming up with challenges for the kids to do in a race against each other.  The challenges range from mental challenges, facetiming friends and family, physical challenges like doing 50 pushups or bouncing a ping pong ball 50x using your left hand, scavenger hunts and any sort of weird stuff I can think of.

The first night... NN blew SW away.  I set the rules...win or lose, you don't boast and you don't cry.  Poor baby had to hold his tears in when he lost.  So I ended the night by saying "This is not an elimination round."  Immediately he was beaming with a smile... but that resulted in me coming up with 2nd night.   And I said SW can recruit Joyce to be on her team, but he had to incur a time penalty.  This time, I purposely chose challenges that SW should win and NN would have trouble with. But NN blew past all those challenges and came in first again.  Night three... I felt guilty for playing favoritism so I only allowed Joyce to join in on 1 challenge.  Surprisingly... one of the challenges was to draw a picture and for some reason, NN spent a lot of time on her masterpiece when all I needed were some chicken scratch allowing SW to catch up and win that leg of the race.   This set up a 4th and final night.

Was running out of ideas... but really... how can you run out of ideas when there's so many things you can do around the house.  Tie your thumbs to do something.  Walk around with a book on your head.  Hit 5 HR's in Wii Sports.   In the end... NN came in first.  SW didn't get to finish his challenges cuz he had a zoom call.

But what's amazing about all this is... how loving NN can really be.  She'll wait for SW.  She'll encourage him.  Figure stuff out with him.  Yes... she's competitive.  Yes... she hates losing.  Yes... she wants to win.  But deep down... she loves her little brother.  So who really wins in this amazing race???

So thankful for siblings.  So thankful I, too, had a sibling growing up.  Mmmm hmmmm...